Your Name Here
by KChasm
Summary: A girl, a wolf, and a brush up against conspiracy. :30 Days of Writing, prompt: letters:


Oh, look, another polished bit from a longer fic which never got far past the planning stages. I've been crashing all day and I don't know why. I caught a mismatched verb tense and a missing comma just looking over this afterwards...near the end. I'll _bet_ you all the big mistakes are near the end.

Animal Crossing was developed and published by Nintendo. I couldn't ever even keep the weed-pulling up and that takes about zero effort, so...

* * *

Lobo woke up to knocking at his door, which was strange, because he could have _sworn_ he'd put the sign up—the sign that said that he was sleeping, and that anybody who ignored the fact that he was sleeping and went knocking anyway was _going to regret it_. He'd left it vague at the end, because he'd never been sure what do if somebody'd actually bothered him (punch them? Even he didn't think he could just _punch_ someone) but that was okay because in all the time he'd used the sign it'd _worked_, and he'd always had his full morning's sleep.

Until now.

"This had better be important," he growled as he opened the door, and then trailed off feeling kind of like a jerk because it obviously _was_.

* * *

He knew the girl at the door. He remembered meeting her the day she'd moved in. Jill, the human—the only human in this nowhere village, in fact. He'd been a little surprised when she'd bothered to talk to him, on that first day, and then even more surprised when she'd bothered to talk to him again (in his experience, he usually only had to say the wrong thing once before anyone figured out it'd be less trouble if they just left him alone).

But that was Jill, right? Some kind of social butterfly. Not that there were any butterflies living in this place, but if there were, Jill would have no problem making buddies with them, either. She certainly flew around the place like one, wandering from villager to villager, greeting each and every one of them, getting in long, _boring_ conversations with that smile up to her eyes...

Now, though, she wasn't smiling at all (though she was making her best effort) and the best he could say about her eyes was that she'd _stopped_ crying at some point. "Can I come in?" she said.

What was he supposed to do, turn her down? "Yeah," he muttered, and stepped back to let her through, shutting the door behind her. When he turned around she was standing in the middle of his room, her head tilted slightly back as if dazed. She had something crumpled up in her hand, too, he noticed for the first time. Some kind of paper—

"Is it okay if I turn the stereo on?"

The question tore him out of his thoughts, and he immediately felt awful again. Who cared about a piece of paper at a time like this? Well, whatever _this_ was. "Yeah," he said again, and because he _had_ to say something almost sarcastic, because she _had_ woken him up earlier than he appreciated: "Knock yourself out—I'm probably not getting any more sleep than this, anyway."

Jill nodded her thanks, and soon the sound of the usual aircheck was filling the room. It was the same recording from the last time she'd stopped by, Lobo remembered. He'd never bothered switching it for anything else. He wondered, idly, if she thought it was the only thing he listened to—and then Jill put her fingers on the volume knob and his eyes widened.

Human ears and wolf ears. _Human ears and wolf ears_.

"Wait—" he began.

Too late. The volume knob went all the way up, and the rest of his sentence was forever lost to modern civilization as his _ears exploded_. Or at least, that was what it felt like. He howled—literally howled—and leapt for the stereo himself to fix this mistake.

Jill's hand caught him short.

"Don't," she said.

There was nothing stopping him from turning the music down anyway. He knew that. Nothing than her hand around his wrist and he could break that grip, easy. But then there was the sudden realization that _she'd done it on purpose_ and he _knew_ she wasn't the type to hurt him for no reason, or even out of spite. Hurt anybody for no reason, or even out of spite. He wasn't sure if she could _feel_ spite, in fact. Which meant—

It meant _something_, he knew that too, but he couldn't quite think with _K.K. Safari_ beating at his skull. He twisted his hand around, grabbed _her_ wrist, and pulled her off to the far corner of the room where volume levels were reaching something approaching almost sort of possibly bearable, maybe. There was something like a nook, there, between the foot of his bed and the lamp she'd gotten him as a present months ago—he dragged her in there after him, pushing her against the wall.

Then he thought better of it and pulled her back and put _himself_ against the wall, instead. The farther from the stereo, the better. "Well?" he snapped. "You nearly make me _deaf_, you've got to have a good reason, right?"

Jill opened her mouth—closed it—opened her mouth again, holding the worn out paper towards him. "I don't know if you're in on it," she said, and there was something in her voice that he didn't like, not at all, "but even if you are, I need somebody to talk to. So—could you read this, please?"

And if he knew what _that_ was supposed to mean, he'd eat his carpet, inch by inch. He took the piece of paper from Jill and carefully unfolded it—maybe its contents would solve the mystery.

It didn't. 'Dear Jill,' it said, 'It's a quiet morning. It's just me, your dad, a pot of coffee, and the birds chirping outside. Love, Mom'. He turned it over, expecting to see more, but that was it. That was it?

Who wrote a letter that short?

And why would something like _this_ make anyone—

"It's a letter from your mom," he said, just a little snidely, and seriously, he was never going to listen to _K.K. Safari_ again. It'd probably been branded into his brain by now. "Lucky you. _I_ don't get any letters from my mom. Can I turn the music down now?"

Jill laughed, and if he'd thought her _smile_ had been funny—not funny-ha-ha but funny-weird funny—then this _laugh_ beat it by miles. "That's what it looks like, doesn't it?" she said, her voice unsteady. "It looks like—like a mom-letter. Like a letter you'd get from mom. It's the very _model_ of a modern mom-letter. If I crossed out my name and put 'Lobo' at the top, you'd probably think it was from _your_ mom, too!"

He read over the letter again. She was right, not that he was going to admit it. The letter was so short, so lacking in specifics that it could've belonged to anybody. "What are you saying?" he asked, even though he had a feeling he already knew.

Jill leaned towards him, pressing her hands against the wall behind his head, and for some reason Lobo had to remind himself that _he_ was the taller one, even as Jill turned her head upwards to look him in the eye. "My mom's divorced," she hissed. "She never remarried. And she _hates coffee_."

She held him there for a few seconds longer, letting him digest those words—and then stepped back abruptly, releasing him. She didn't say anything else. Just turned her back and crossed the room to tune the stereo down to a lower volume, and then off.

Lobo looked back down at the letter in his hand. His other hand scratched absently at his cheek, catching in a tangle of fur. "I'm not saying I believe you," he said, "but if I _do_ believe you, then who—"

"Oh, I wasn't here last year, so I don't know much about it. But Cube told me that there are prizes if you catch a big enough fish, so I thought I'd practice until Sunday!" Jill turned again, to look at him—and she was _smiling_, that bright, cheerful smile that Lobo'd seen painted on her face a hundred time before. He wondered, briefly, if she'd gone crazy or he had—and then Jill reached up, slowly, deliberately, and _pulled at the lobe of her ear_.

"What about you, Lobo?" she asked.

"I—uh—fishing's not exactly my forte, but—I might give it a try?" The end came out more strangled that he would've liked. He hoped nobody was listening in, and not just for Jill's sake.

Jill nodded. That smile seemed a little bit more genuine—but then again, had they ever been? He'd have to do some thinking, when this was done. "I'm going out to collect fruit!" she said, and she even _sounded_ excited. "Mr. Nook says that if I pay off what I owe for my house, he might even build me an expansion! Wouldn't that be neat?"

"Yeah," he mumbled. "Neat."

"I guess I'll talk to you later!"

She shut the door behind her. Lobo lasted all of six seconds.

"W-wait—hold on, I'm going with you!"


End file.
